Building West Kowloon: Between Infrastructure and Urbanism

Abstract

A by-product of the reclamations instigated as part of the mega-infrastructural strategy to bolster Hong Kong after the city’s transfer from British control to the PRC, the patchwork planning for and realization of West Kowloon’s disconnected parts reveal more the shifts in Special Administrative Region (SAR)’s governance than a deliberate lack of an overall vision for the waterfront area. This paper builds on important existing analyses that have charted the tortuous path for the West Kowloon Cultural District’s development that reflect the challenges of the Hong Kong SAR’s governance structure. Expanding into the larger reclamation area of West Kowloon and analyzing its urban products from the lens of architecture, this piece will examine how the prioritization of infrastructural efficiencies at the expense of an overall urban vision magnifies the already existing socio-political frictions. The Cultural District’s adjacency to but disconnect from the Kowloon Station development that preceded it and the Express Rail Link (XRL) and Austin Station that followed it as well as the entire area’s segregation from the older area of Jordan is only one of the many ways the physical realization of the area manifests the governance structure’s fragilities. The embracing of a “large basement” for the Cultural District, separating transportation from pedestrian flows above, is another urban design move proven to be flawed since its first realizations in the 1970s. Further exacerbating the contest for infrastructural efficiency versus urban quality dominance is the vertical layering of ownerships on megaplots. Infrastructural efficiency, which had been trademark for Hong Kong’s economic success in the 1980s under British rule, is burden for the SAR developmentalist state, when it becomes obstacle to the other urban layers that contribute to a broader vision for the city’s future.